On Feed: M.T. Andersen


Imagine a future where you connect to the internet via a feed implanted in your brain. A feed that knows what you like, and sends you content accordingly. It even sends you adverts for the things it knows you will like. It doesn't sound too far away, does it?

 Well, M. T. Andersen wrote Feed 10 years ago, before internet connected mobiles, before facebook (if anyone can remember a world without status updates!), which makes the book a shockingly accurate vision of the future, and a tour de force in dystopian fiction.

 Below is a little post from M. T. Andersen about his thought process behind the book. What do you think?

When I wrote Feed, my intention wasn’t really to predict future tech — but instead, to think about cultural conditions as they already were then. All around us, ads, TV shows, and movies nudge us with images of the high life, playing on our desire to belong. When I was a teen, this drove me crazy (as it bugs and worries many teens). There’s always that subliminal message seducing us and bullying us: If you just get this, and buy this, and order that, you’ll be cool, and you’ll be loved. See how much fun these kids are having? If you want to be wanted, then you need to want what other people want. And other people — what they want is this. Buy it. Buy it now.

This marketing has become even more intense (and not just for teens!) now that most of us are connected all the time through devices of one kind or another. I don’t even notice the ads that flit past me anymore, I take them so much for granted. And even though I know that my favorite shows are paid for product placement, I take that for granted, too.

Of course, I wrote Feed back in 2001, before most of these devices existed, and before marketing systems had become as sophisticated as they are now. But even then I was still tapped into a wider system of corporate communication. Already my dreams of who I wanted to be, my understanding of who I had been in the past, my hopes for who I’d become in the future — these things had already been influenced and perhaps even constructed by advertising images, movie sequences, and prime-time TV, the hours of images of twenty-somethings crammed into bars, girls smiling at men who drank the right beer, leaving me with a dim impression that I was supposed to like a certain kind of music, a certain kind of shirt, a certain kind of ribs.

So I began to conceive of a story in which these media connections and social networking
connections weren’t external, but within us all. What if we no longer needed devices? What if we had an Internet feed within us, so we were never disconnected?

It is out of the memory of my anger as a teen at the bullying manoeuvres of “youth marketing” that I wrote the book — but also out of the knowledge that even now, I’m part of this system of desire. I still can’t get out of my head the images of who I’m supposed to be. (For my current age: the picket fence, the lawn, holding some daughter up toward the sun in a moment of joy about our paint swatches, strapping my tykes into the SUV.)

I don’t think this would have been an interesting book to write (or to read) if I had only hated the hyper-marketed world I describe. For me, the key to the discomfort — and the exploration — is how much I love some of it, how much I still do want to be slick like the people on the tube, beautiful, laughing, surrounded by friends. And how much I legitimately do think that the technology-based information resources at our command now are incredible. These are tools for an amazing new understanding of the world, though they come with strings attached. Think about the way technological progress over the last twenty years has revolutionized the artistic possibilities in film or the data-collection processes of medical research — or almost any field. We have at our fingertips knowledge and power like no other generation before us, and that’s intoxicating.

I am no Luddite. And this would not have been an effective satire, in my opinion, if I hadn’t also been seduced by what I was mocking. It is the anguish of indecision that animates it. This is indeed a brave new world, but there is a cost. My conception of that cost has perhaps changed a little since I wrote the book a decade ago. At the time, I was worried about the cultural effect of this information buzz on how we understood ourselves — even on our own neurological development. Now I am more worried by how this media shell actually insulates us from  understanding the world around us.

We live in an increasingly complicated world of commerce. It’s very hard to track where the things we buy come from, where they’re assembled, who’s involved in making or growing all of the things we consume. Food is regularly shipped to us across thousands of miles from corporate farms. The gadgetry we love is constructed in residential factories on the other side of the world. Our winter clothes are stitched together in concrete bunkhouses in tropical climes. As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder for any of us to keep track of how things were made and how they got to us. Yet at the same time, whenever we buy something, we’re also putting in a “yea” vote for the system that put it together. We’re responsible for a world we don’t understand.

For democracy to work effectively, there must be an educated and informed electorate. By the same token, for the free market to work, it requires informed and intelligent consumers. We have to comprehend the long-term effects of what we buy, or we are nothing but dupes.

Unfortunately, in a saturated media world, it is hard to find these things out. We are all suspended in a sphere of imagery and voices vying for attention. How do we know that what’s going on is actually in our best interest? How can we be sure that our way of life will be preserved for the future? And do we really want it to be?

This is what I worry about now, as I consider the feed and its possibilities. People have told me that Feed is coming true. (Many of the technologies I discussed have been explored in recent years.) But in a sense, I believe it already was the reality when I was writing.

I was already dreaming in advertisements.

 Feed is available now from all good bookshops.

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 Also available as an eBook

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